“Watching Jaws today, the film shows its age from the very start. The cheesy TV-movie typeface of the credits, the hair and clothes, the normalization of smoking — all very ’70s. But there’s more. Jaws, especially relative to its more frenetic ostensible inheritors, has a control and a coherence that’s cinematically classical, as opposed to classic. It doesn’t shrug off death the way so many of today’s big summer movies do. Five people fall victim to the shark in Spielberg’s movie. Asked how many people were killed in his 2013 blockbuster Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder replied, ’Probably five thousand.’ Jaws takes its time, letting the horrors wrought by the shark’s destructive path sink in. Actress Lee Fierro, as the mother of a young child killed by the beast, has one of the film’s most memorable moments when she slowly approaches Roy Scheider’s Sheriff Brody and then slaps him in the face, saying: ’My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that.’”

“His early work—a personal answer to his fellow alto saxophonist and innovator Charlie Parker—lay right inside the jazz tradition, generating a handful of standards for jazz musicians of the last half-century. But he later challenged assumptions about jazz from top to bottom, bringing in his own ideas about instrumentation, process and technical expertise. He was more voluble and theoretical than John Coltrane, the other great pathbreaker of that jazz era. He was a kind of musician-philosopher, whose interests reached well beyond jazz. He was seen as a native avant-gardist, personifying the American independent will as much as any artist of the last century. Slight, Southern and soft-spoken, Mr. Coleman became a visible part of New York City’s cultural life, often attending parties in bright silk suits. He could talk in sometimes baffling language about harmony and ontology, but his utterances could also be disarming in their freshness and clarity.”

1. “Introducing Caitlyn Jenner.”Vanity Fair’s 22-page cover story features stunning Annie Leibovitz photos of Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, along with revealing new details. Here’s a preview of the story.

“Speaking publicly for the first time since completing gender transition, Caitlyn Jenner compares her emotional two-day photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for the July cover of Vanity Fair to winning the gold medal for the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics. She tells Pulitzer Prize–winning V.F. contributing editor and author of Friday Night Lights Buzz Bissinger, ’That was a good day, but the last couple of days were better….This shoot was about my life and who I am as a person. It’s not about the fanfare, it’s not about people cheering in the stadium, it’s not about going down the street and everybody giving you ’that a boy, Bruce,’ pat on the back, O.K. This is about your life.’ Jenner tells Bissinger about how she suffered a panic attack the day after undergoing 10-hour facial-feminization surgery on March 15—a procedure she believed would take 5 hours. (Bissinger reveals that Jenner has not had genital surgery.) She recalls thinking, ’What did I just do? What did I just do to myself?’ A counselor from the Los Angeles Gender Center came to the house so Jenner could talk to a professional, and assured her that such reactions were often induced by pain medication, and that second-guessing was human and temporary.”

1. “What Was Gay?” In an increasingly accepting world, homosexual men are all too eager to leave their campy, cruising past behind. But the price of equality shouldn’t be conformity.

“Of course, anyone who’s even eavesdropped on the long-running debate over ’gay identity’ among homosexuals will know that this position—that gayness might be located in sensibility or style as well as sex—is currently anathema. We live in the era dominated by a born-this-way, ’it’s-a-small-part-of-me’ ethos that minimizes gay difference to sexual attraction. The current dogma among mainstream LGBTQ advocacy organizations and the majority of gay writers and public figures sees gayness as little more than a hazy accident of biology that shouldn’t be legally or socially disadvantaging. Any notion of some inherent cultural affiliation (’gays love Gaga’) or unique sensibility (’fags get fashion’) has been pretty much disavowed within the community—imagine the uproar if some naïve network executive tried rebooting a minstrelsy-driven show like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2015—and many straights have gotten the memo as well.”

“We don’t all partake of the same slang menu—you say ’pop,’ I say ’soda,’ and we’ll all get properly sorted on Judgment Day. Wherever you hail from, you’ll recognize ’You do you’ and ’Do you’ as contemporary versions of that life-affirming chestnut ’Just be yourself.’ It’s the gift of encouragement from one person to another, what we tell children on the first day of kindergarten, how we reassure buddies as they primp for a blind date or rehearse asking for a raise. You do you, as if we could be anyone else. Depending on your essential qualities, this song of oneself is cause for joy or tragedy. You’ve also come across that expression’s siblings, like the defensive, arms-crossed ’Haters gonna hate’ or the perpetually shrugging ’It is what it is.’ Like black holes, they are inviolable. All criticism is destroyed when it hits the horizon of their circular logic, and not even light can escape their immense gravity. In a world where the selfie has become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like ’You do you’ and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our ever-evolving, ever more complicated narcissism.”

“The reënactment is the bane and the curse of the modern documentary film—more so, even, than ominous-drone music. Andrew Jarecki’s irresistibly fascinating investigative series The Jinx strains mightily under this curse (it’s got the music, too). It’s a curse of Jarecki’s own making, a result of his directorial choices, and, ultimately, it’s why the series—for all the remarkable research that went into it and the real-life justice it may well help to bring about—is largely mediocre. The Jinx is a model of post-facto filmmaking, which exists not to be seen but to be discussed. The series is a delivery, not a creation, a great and memorable investigative success, but a failure of aesthetic judgment. For much of its span, it plays like In Cold Blood as written by Dan Brown.”

“One theme dominates American history from its origins to this morning’s news—the consequences, and how to deal with them, of the importation into the United States of Africans as slaves. President Barack Obama is not a descendant of slaves, but he is black, and that fact has unloosed or perhaps only illuminated a renewed white political resistance to racial equality that future historians will record as the third phase of the struggle by white Americans to retain political and social control. The first phase, centering on the question of slavery, extended from the counting of black slaves as three-fifths of a man in the Constitution of 1787 through ratification of the 13th Amendment banning slavery in 1865. The second phase, triggered by white shock at the social revolution implicit in the end of slavery, centered on white use of vigilante terror and control of the courts to deny political and civil rights for black Americans. Soon after the civil-rights acts of the 1960s ended the second phase, a third emerged, triggered by white shock at the fact of black legal and political equality. The first line of white defense in each phase has been denial—denial in the first phase that slavery was cruel, exploitive, and wrong, and denial in the second phase that lynching, Jim Crow laws, and whites-only primaries were intended to control African-Americans. In the third phase, it is denied that implacable Republican hostility to Obama has anything to do with race; that the all-Republican South, like the all-Democratic South which preceded it, is primarily an instrument of white control; that voter-ID laws are aimed at blocking votes by blacks and Hispanics, and that the predominance of white men voting Republican (64 percent in the midterm elections) is explained by race. History suggests that it takes roughly 50 years for denial to run its course; after that, everybody will know what the struggle is about, and no historian will blame it on Obama.”

“Her visual chops are undeniable, but the managerial skills she honed while toiling on the logistical side of showbiz are an equally important part of her success. TV is art made under pressure. Big Hollywood films might shoot for months; TV dramas typically shoot entire episodes in two weeks. A producer is both a diplomat and an enforcer, overseeing the logistical and financial aspects of a shoot while negotiating truces between prickly artists and telling them ’No’ without crushing their spirits. MacLaren approaches the job with a stoic unflappability leavened by nonchalant Canadian cheer. While managing a second unit on the 1991 mountain-climbing drama K2 in British Columbia, MacLaren asked her mom to FedEx a box containing Halloween decorations, candy, espresso beans, and a grinder, then staged a Halloween party on Mount Waddington. Even with Wonder Woman looming, she’s directed the second episode of Better Call Saul and has signed a two-year deal with HBO to develop and oversee new projects. This producer-director hybrid thing is not without its cognitive dissonance, but for the most part, it works: Who better to blow up trains than a woman who spent decades making sure they ran on time?”

“As I wrestled with the idea of telling my story of the day Bill Cosby drugged me with the intention of doing God knows what, the faces of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless other brown and black men took residence in my mind. As if I needed to be reminded. The current plight of the black male was behind my silence when Barbara Bowman came out to tell the horrific details of being drugged and raped by Cosby to the Washington Post in November. And I watched in horror as my longtime friend and fellow model Janice Dickinson was raked over the coals for telling her account of rape at Cosby’s hands. Over the years I’ve met other women who also claim to have been violated by Cosby. Many are still afraid to speak up. I couldn’t sit back and watch the other women be vilified and shamed for something I knew was true.”

“White Jazz is another ’Carnahan Brothers’ joint; the pairing is yet to actually surface onscreen. Carnahan isn’t afraid to sound crass when he says the movie transcends Ellroy. He’ll even go one step further: ’The script is better than that book. My brother and I wrote a hell of a script. It took us a long time and we busted our asses.’ It’s another script, he says, that scares away talent; it’s physically and mentally demanding. Carnahan never spoke to George Clooney before Clooney stepped away from the project and never heard a straight answer from his producer, Grant Heslov, as to why it didn’t work out. Carnahan can only guess. ’They call [lead character Dave Klein] ’The Enforcer.’ I said to George[’s people], ’You’re going to have to build up your neck and almost be like a bull terrier.’ This is not a dig at Clooney at all, but that’s three or four months in the gym, pounding it out to get a very specific look, because you can’t look shredded. That’s not 1958. They were throwing people through windows—that’s how they were building muscle mass.’ Where’s Liam Neeson when you need him?”